Hi Trisquelers, I would welcome some perspective and advice regarding an
apparently corrupted hard drive.
Last Christmas I gave my brother a laptop from MiniFree, with Trisquel
installed. Just days ago he told me he booted it and it went straight to a
busybox console. Reading up on this, I understand that his boot partition is
corrupted, and some flavor of fsck may fix it. (Or at least some partition
is corrupted, but he said it comes up in a few seconds.)
But why would a hard drive be corrupted? With a journaling file system, it's
hard to corrupt it through user activity. Might there be a hardware failure?
If this is the case, trying to fix it would actually make it worse, if it
writes incorrect data to the drive. Right? The laptop is "new" although of
course it was manufactured by Lenovo many years ago. Is it odd for a drive
to become corrupted? (It's a solid-state drive.)
He lives in another city, so I can't simply stop over and check things out in
person.
I could possibly talk him through using a simple application of fsck, but if
it's wise to copy data first, that would probably be too hard to manage.
What would you do?
Thanks,
-Jim
